Sunday, December 14, 2014

Lotus Notes - Error: "Time Is Too Far in the Future"

If you encouter this error message - Error: "Time Is Too Far in the Future" - when you run nfixup, ncompact, nupdall, etc... Or, you suddenly realized that your Inbox is not displaying recent email, you are most like hit by "Future Date Issue"

To verify whether you had been hit by "Future Date Issue", you can do the following

1. Go to your Inbox then click Alt+Enter. This will open up a document properties dialog
2. Switch to database properties
3. Click on "I" tab and check on the Activity date. If the modified date is in the future, it means that you had been hit by "Future Data Issue"

When this happen, new document will be hidden in your Inbox because they have a delivery date that is in the future. However, you could still see your incoming email from All Document folder.

To fix this, you will have to create a new replica with the following step

1. In your Mail view, go to File -> Replication -> New Replica...
2. It will prompt up a dialog box. Enter a correct Server and File Path. Then click Ok. (It will be best to backup your current nsf file before creating a new replica)
3. It will take awhile to create the new replica depending on the data need to be copy and synchronized from the server.

After the above steps, you should have a new replica with a correct modification date. You can look at the database properties to verify it.

The above is something that works best for me after trying other methods like running nfixup/nupdall command, create a new view with "Future Date" formula, etc...